James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

He never asked to come to our house again, and whenever I saw him he always conveyed the feeling I had stolen something valuable from him rather than he from us.

Clete parked his dinged, chartreuse Cadillac convertible by the boat ramp and walked down the dock with Jerry Joe toward the bait shop. Jerry Joe was ebullient, enthused by the morning and the personal control he brought to it. His taut body looked made of whipcord, his hair thick and blond and wavy, combed in faint ducktails in back. He wore oxblood tasseled loafers, beige slacks, a loose-fitting navy blue sports shirt with silver thread in it. I said he walked down the dock. That's not true. Jerry Joe rolled, a Panama hat spinning on his finger, his thighs flexing against his slacks, change and keys ringing in his pockets, the muscles in his shoulders as pronounced as oiled rope.

"Comment la vie, Dave? You still sell those ham-and-egg sandwiches?" he said, and went through the screen door without waiting for an answer.

"Why'd you do this, Clete?" I said.

"There're worst guys in the life," he replied.

"Which ones?"

Jerry Joe bought a can of beer and a paper plate of sliced white boudin at the counter and sat at a table in back.

"You're sure full of sunshine, Dave," he said.

"I'm off the clock. If this is about Mingo, you should take it to the office," I said.

He studied me. At the corner of his right eye was a coiled white scar. He speared a piece of boudin with a toothpick and put it in his mouth.

"I'm bad for business here, I'm some kind of offensive presence?" he asked.

"We're way down different roads, Jerry Joe."

"Pull my jacket. Five busts, two convictions, both for operating illegal gambling equipment. This in a state that allows cock fighting… You got a jukebox here?"

"No."

"I heard about the drowned black girl. Mingo's dirty on this?"

"That's the name on the warrant."

"He says his car got boosted."

"We've got two witnesses who can put him together with the car and the girl."

"They gotta stand up, though. Right?" he asked.

"Nobody had better give them reason not to."

He pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand, leaned forward on his elbows, rolling the toothpick across his teeth. Under the bronze hair of his right forearm was a tattoo of a red parachute and the words 101st Airborne.

"I hire guys like Mingo to avoid trouble, not to have it. But to give up one of my own people, even though maybe he's a piece of shit, I got to have… what's the term for it… compelling reasons, yeah, that's it," he said.

"How does aiding and abetting sound, or conspiracy after the fact?"

He scratched his face and glanced around the bait shop. His eyes crinkled at the corners. "You like my tattoo? Same outfit as Jimi Hendrix," he said.

I pushed a napkin and a pencil stub toward him. "Write down an address, Jerry Joe. NOPD will pick him up. You won't be connected with it."

"Why don't you get a jukebox? I'll have one of my vendors come by and put one in. You don't need no red quarters. You keep a hundred percent," he said. "Hey, Dave, it's all gonna work out. It's a new day. I guarantee it. Don't get tied up with this Aaron Crown stuff."

"What?"

But he drank his beer, winked at me as he fitted on his Panama hat, then walked out to the Cadillac to wait for Clete.

Monday morning, when I went into work, I walked past Karyn LaRose's blue Mazda convertible in the parking lot. She sat behind the wheel, in dark glasses with a white scarf tied around her hair. When I glanced in her direction, she picked up a magazine from the seat and began reading it, a pout on her mouth.

"There's a guy talks like a college professor waiting to see you, Dave," Wally, the dispatcher, said. His great weight caused a perpetual flush in his neck and cheeks, as though he had just labored up a flight of stairs, and whenever he laughed, usually at his own jokes, his breath wheezed deep in his chest.

I looked through the doorway of the waiting room, then pointed my finger at the back of a white-haired man.

"That gentleman there?" I asked Wally.

"Let's see, we got two winos out there, a bondsman, a woman says UFOs is sending electrical signals through her hair curlers, the black guy cleans the Johns, and the professor. Let me know which one you t'ink, Dave." His face beamed at his own humor.

Clay Mason, wearing a brown narrow-cut western coat with gold and green brocade on it, a snap-button turquoise shirt, striped vaquero pants, and yellow cowboy boots on his tiny feet, sat in a folding chair with a high-domed pearl Stetson on his crossed knee.

I was prepared to dislike him, to dismiss him as the Pied Piper of hallucinogens, an irresponsible anachronism who refused to die with the 1960s. But I was to learn that psychedelic harlequins don't survive by just being psychedelic harlequins.

"Could I help you, sir?" I asked.

"Yes, thank you. I just need a few minutes," he said, turning to look up at me, his thought processes broken. He started to rise, then faltered. I placed my hand under his elbow and was struck by his fragility, the lightness of his bones.

A moment later I closed my office door behind us. His hair was as fine as white cornsilk, his lined mouth and purple lips like those of an old woman. When he sat down in front of my desk his attention seemed to become preoccupied with two black trusties mowing the lawn.

"Yes, sir?" I said.

"I've interposed myself in your situation. I hope you won't take offense," he said.

"Are we talking about the LaRoses?" I tried to smile when I said it.

"She's contrite about her behavior, even though I think she needs her rear end paddled. In lieu of that, however, I'm passing on an apology for her." The accent was soft, deep in the throat, west Texas perhaps. Then I remembered the biographical sketches, the pioneer family background, the inherited oil fortune, the academic scandals that he carried with him like tattered black flags.

"Karyn lied, Dr. Mason. With forethought and malicious intent. You don't get absolution by sending a surrogate to confession."

"That's damn well put. Will you walk with me into the parking lot?"

"No."

"Your feelings are your feelings, sir. I wouldn't intrude upon them." His gaze went out the window. He flipped the back of his hand at the air. "It never really changes, does it?"

"Sir?"

"The black men in prison clothes. Still working off their indenture to the white race."

"One of those guys molested his niece. The other one cut his wife's face with a string knife."

"Then they're a rough pair and probably got what's coming to them," he said, and rose from his chair by holding on to the edge of my desk.

I walked him to the back door of the building. When I opened the door the air was cool, and dust and paper were blowing in the parking lot. Karyn looked at us through the windshield of her car, her features muted inside her scarf and dark glasses. Clay Mason waved his Stetson at the clouds, the leaves spinning in the wind.

"Listen to it rumble, by God. It's a magic land. There's a thunder of calvary in every electric storm," he said.

I asked a deputy to walk Clay Mason the rest of the way.

"Don't be too hard on the LaRoses," Mason said as the deputy took his arm. "They put me in mind of Eurydice and Orpheus trying to flee the kingdom of the dead. Believe me, son, they could use a little compassion."

Keep your eye on this one, I thought.

Karyn leaned forward and started her car engine, wetting her mouth as she might a ripe cherry.

Helen Soileau walked into my office that afternoon, anger in her eyes.

"Pick up on my extension," she said.

"What's going on?"